“I said, ‘Okay, what I’ve got to do is climb down
off this branch of the tree and get down on the
ground and look around for another tree to go up,
in terms of guitar design.’ ”
The Alembic Years and
Fleetwood Mac
Thus began Turner’s critical,
tumultuous Alembic period.
Turner co-founded Alembic with
Wickersham, and the company’s
initial aim was to push the envelope
of live sound through the medium
of Grateful Dead shows.
Turner worked on practically
everything Alembic touched, includ-
ing designing speaker cabinets to
eliminate standing waves in the
Dead’s Wall of Sound PA system—
which had McIntosh power amps
pushing 125,000 watts through 450
drivers. Once Turner, Wickersham,
and the other folks at Alembic had
tackled the acoustic and electronic
considerations of large PA systems,
they focused on the instruments—
primarily Lesh’s basses and Garcia’s
guitars. Soon things started to snow-
ball: A carving job Turner did for
an early Alembic bass made for Jack
Casady helped put Alembic on the
map as an instrument maker, as did
their work for Stanley Clarke.
Before Turner’s time with
Alembic was up, he found himself
involved with another milestone in
the history of rock and roll—the
studio sessions for Fleetwood Mac’s
Rumours album, which the band
was recording at the Record Plant
just across the Golden Gate Bridge
from San Francisco. Turner was sent
over to do a setup on John McVie’s
Alembic #33 bass, and he ended
up staying for much of the sessions
to work as a guitar tech because
Lindsey Buckingham’s Strat had an
Alembic Strat-o-Blaster preamp that
kept blowing his Hiwatt amps.
“The preamp was turned up
all the way—that’s 12 dB of gain
coming out of the Strat-o-Blaster!”
Turner relates. “Evidently, the
Hiwatts were set up so that the gain
structure expected a normal elec-
tric guitar output from the guitar.
When you jacked it up by 12 dB,
the amp tried to suck more current
the Dead’s warehouse and showed
Ron Wickersham, who had figured
out how to measure the frequency
response in the pickups. This was
when nobody knew anything about
what was really going on. The stuff
that we take for granted now, we
had to invent and figure out.”
Rick Turner Model 1 Specs
The first Model 1 guitar built for Fleetwood Mac’s Lindsey Buckingham featured
the following specifications.
Dimensions
• Scale length: 24 3/4"
• Nut width: 1 11/16"
• Fretboard radius: 12"
• String span at bridge: 2"
Woods
• Body: Mahogany
• Neck: Laminated maple and purpleheart set neck with
24 medium-jumbo frets
Hardware
• Tuners: Schaller M6-A
• Bridge: Copy of Turner’s early-’70s Alembic design built
by Stars Guitars
• Knobs: Mouser Electronics Eagle knurled black aluminum
Electronics
• Pickup: Rotatable Rick Turner-designed, high-impedance humbucker with
ceramic magnets, built by Bartolini
• Controls: Quasi-parametric EQ with hardwire-bypass switch, a 150 Hz– 3. 5 kHz
sweep knob, 12 dB boost/cut knob, and Master Volume and passive Tone knobs
through the power transformer
and it just fried. But it sounded
great for about 15 or 20 minutes!
[Laughs.] At about that same time,
I did a Strat-o-Blaster in Lowell
George’s Strat. So that whole
Waiting for Columbus live album by
Little Feat—that’s all Lowell with
his Strat cranked way past 11.”
Turner left Alembic in 1978
with many lessons learned. “Alembic
electric guitars were noted for being
too clean and sterile sounding,” he
notes. “And it was often attributed
to the electronics. I came to the
conclusion that it was not the elec-
tronics—it was the way the guitars
were made. The very stiff neck-
through-body construction, with
a primarily maple and purpleheart
neck, didn’t allow enough warmth
and body to come in.”
Given his involvement with the
legendary acid-trip rock band of
the flower power era (and of all
time), as well as the freewheeling,
“free love” reputation of the scene
www.premierguitar.com
it dominated, one could easily
assume Turner sort of stumbled
onto the recipes that his high-caliber instruments and electronics
are known for. Nothing could be
further from the truth. He studied
acoustics and the science of sound
extensively, and even took Don
Davis’s famed Synergetic Audio
Concepts (aka “SynAudCon”)
class. He also learned invaluable
lessons from his association with
Wickersham (whom he calls “a
genius”), John Curl—who remains
on the cutting age of audio
design—and Dead live sound
mixer Owsley “Bear” Stanley. In
fact, the lessons garnered from
this time with Alembic and the
Rumours sessions with Buckingham
were crucial to Turner’s development of the Model 1.
“Based on talks with Lindsey,
and also the general criticism of
Alembic guitars, I started thinking
very deliberately,” says Turner. “I
said, ‘Okay, what I’ve got to do is
